The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

Men often marry their mothers.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

No one in the United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don't care how they came by it.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.